Several years ago, a former Saudi oil minister issued what has since become an oft-quoted prophecy: “The Stone Age did not end for lack of stone, and the Oil Age will end long before the world runs out of oil”. It was a lament, and acknowledgement that a day of reckoning was coming that would change the global balance of wealth and power. A fluke of geology had made the vast emptiness of the Saudi desert the number one source of the most important commodity on earth. But the good times would not, and could not, last forever, and he knew it.
If you go back far enough, you can trace the prosperity and security of nations, corporations, and even individuals to energy. And in our petroleum-dependent world, that, for the most part, means Oil Government rise and fall on it, armies run on it, companies rely on it, and consumers depend on it from the time they wake to their clock radios to the moment they turn off their TVs and fall asleep. For the past century, despite rising prices and occasional “crises” — more often than not manufactured events resulting from political or economic forces — there has always been enough oil available to keep the engines of global growth humming. But that is a luxury of the past. In the future, a new and uncertain energy age is emerging.
